Some years ago, at a technology road show, Sun handed out this ballpoint pen. For free, which is nice. Everybody loves a free ballpoint pen.

Since the age of cavemen, millions of years of experience with using ballpoint pens has engraved human brains with the instinctive knowledge that to use it, you just need to push the button at the top.

Not this one. You have to twist it, which is the second thing our subconscious brain does when there is no button to press.

But there is a button at the top of this ballpoint pen. It will light up a cool, but utterly useless blue LED.

So every time you happened to grab this ballpoint pen, you would instinctively turn on a meaningless blue light effect first, feel annoyed about it, turn it off and then twist it.

This pen lasted quite a while and it always reminded me how annoying Sun Microsystems was. So this week, the pen finally ran out of ink. The light still works. There are three button cell batteries inside, considered hazardous waste. To dispose of them properly, I now have to bring them to a recycling centre.

Ok, so this story isn’t really true. The true reason we never bought Sun hardware was that we were happy with vanilla x86 hardware running Linux. But boy, what an annoying pen.

One Response to “That damn Sun ballpoint pen”

Hey,
sun’s handing out the cheapo version. There’s a version of this pen, which will start to blink and play music when you press the button. We used them in recruitment:
“Could you write some pseudocode doing $BLAH?” and hand out the pen.